Ep.73 Fuck Self Sabotage! The Key to the Shift.

Do you ever wonder why nothing seems to be working out for you, or why it feels like everything's working out for everyone but you? This episode is for you. It's not bad luck, and by the end you'll see the pattern you didn't even know you were building, or have had deep in your subconscious your whole life.

EPISODE SUMMARY

This week I'm telling on myself. After moving to Austin and building new community from scratch, I kept asking myself why the same things kept happening to me, why it felt like everyone else, even my own family, was thriving while I wasn't. Turns out I was doing something I thought I'd already healed: building an entire identity around being EXCLUDED. Not just feeling left out one time, but scanning for proof of it everywhere, calling friends I knew would take my side, and slowly turning a single emotion into a full blown personality. In this episode I break down the difference between feeling an emotion and identifying with it, why the victim role feels so hard to release even when it's costing you everything, and the exact journaling process I used to unwire it, the same one I walk clients through one on one. If overthinking, control, and the same painful situations keep finding you, this episode will show you the subconscious pattern actually running the show, and how nervous system regulation starts with just noticing it.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why certain painful situations keep repeating themselves, and how you might be unknowingly reinforcing the pattern
• The real difference between feeling an emotion and building an entire identity around it
• Why the victim identity can feel so hard to release, and exactly what it's protecting you from
• How to spot a "bandwagon friend," and why venting can quietly turn into gossip
• Why an already healed pattern can come back "in costume" to test whether you really learned the lesson
• A full journaling practice to find the subconscious belief actually running the show
• How just 120 seconds can move stress chemicals like cortisol out of your body

REFLECTION

• What is the story you keep telling about yourself, or about your life, right now?
• Who are you presenting to the world when this identity is running?
• What would you have to feel, and who would you have to become, to get what you actually want?

If you've done the work but something keeps pulling you back into an old identity and you can't figure out why, book a free Freedom Roadmap Session. It's just a conversation, no pressure, just clarity on what's keeping you stuck. Link in the show notes.

And if you need something tonight, the free 5-Minute Nervous System Reset can move the stress chemicals of that victim spiral out of your body in about 120 seconds. Link in the show notes.

You're not broken. You're not behind. And you're not alone. If you made it here, that means something.

TIMESTAMPS

02:17 — The identity shift that started with her move to Austin, and feeling like everyone else was thriving but her 

03:00 — The 40th birthday retreat story in Mexico, and spiraling into "poor me" 

04:41 — The difference between feeling an emotion and building an identity around it 

06:29 — Why this isn't a character flaw, it's the mind in survival mode 

08:04 — The real payoff of staying the victim: not having to be responsible for changing anything 

09:17 — Bandwagon friends, venting versus gossip, and misery loving company 

10:27 — How an old wound can come back "in costume" without you recognizing it 

12:07 — Recognition as the first step, and why victim energy tanks your power 

13:02 — The journaling practice begins: naming the story and the core emotion underneath it 

14:43 — What you actually want to feel instead, and who you have to become to get there 

15:44 — Noticing the thought loop and the inner voice running it 15:57 — Locating the feeling in the body

17:14 — Who you're presenting to the world when this identity is running 

19:33 — Closing encouragement to come back to the journaling questions with radical honesty 

21:05 — Reminder about the free 5-minute Nervous System Reset and closing out

5 minute nervous system reset ad for midroll

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Fuck anxiety. It's a battle cry to all the women out there who are so tired of continuing to let anxiety keep them imprisoned in their own lives. If you wake up already exhausted, even after a full night of sleep, you move through your day taking care of everything. The kids, the work, the responsibilities, you show up with a smile, but you have it all together. Underneath, something that doesn't feel right. No one can really tell me good. A lot of these episodes go built off my own personal situations and how I bring them back to the work that I do and how it can really support you when you're in these situations as well. So today I have a couple of questions for you. Do you ever feel like certain situations just keep happening to you over and over and you can't figure out why? Do you ever catch yourself looking for proof that people don't include you? They don't see you, they don't show up for you, they don't reach out to you. Have you ever made a phone call in a situation where you're going through something and you call this friend just because you know that they would agree and take your side? I am definitely a victim of that. And is it possible that without even realizing it, you've started to build your whole identity, your whole personality around the very thing that's hurting you? If any of these questions resonate, this episode is for you. Because this is exactly what I caught myself recently doing, me. And I'm going to tell you all about it. And I want to share the process of how I start to unravel these very structures of this identity that I was slowly starting to create. So if you've been with me, you've kind of heard my story recently about moving to Austin and having to find new community and new friends, and how I was starting to realize that my family, my children, and my husband were thriving more than me. And I was starting to be the victim of that. Like at first I was like super excited that they were thriving because I, if anything, I think we all thought it was going to be the other way around, that it was going to be me thriving because it was my choice to move. Um, but if anything, it was the other way around. But like that, even that, the small identity shift of that, of like, oh, well, they're really doing well, but I'm not. Like, that's where this lack victimization identity started building. And, you know, I joined certain social groups and things just really weren't working out. And I just wanted to be like the victim of it. And instead of just like sitting with what was, I started collecting the evidence to validate all of these ideas. I was scanning for proof, for more proof that all the things that I was thinking were true. I was catching myself, even in conversations, trying to get my friends on my side, making phone calls to the people who might validate how I'm feeling. And the past, you know, it's gotten worse and worse. And I can even remember at my 40th birthday last year, I was on a retreat in Mexico. And same thing. I was like, poor me. It was my birthday, and I was volunteering at this retreat, and I had a lot of friends that were volunteering, and they didn't quote unquote make time for me that day, which is bullshit because they actually had a dinner for me. But like I just wanted to spiral into this like, I'm not enoughness or something. So while it wasn't like going to this extreme, there were definitely like, I was just starting to feel like sad, almost depressed, kind of of like, what am I gonna do? And I just wasn't really liking the way that I was being. And so I really felt like I was creating an identity, a personality about this situation. And I needed to go back to the very work that I do with my clients, that I did with myself when my anxiety was the worst about unwiring the programs, the neural pathways that validate all of this identity, all of this personality. And so that's what I did. So with that, we don't just have emotions. We build identities around the emotions that we have. And the difference between feeling excluded and deciding I am someone who is always excluded. One is if I'm just feeling excluded, there's a feeling that moves through my body. Okay. And if I'm deciding I'm someone who is always excluded, that's now being part of the personality, part of the identity. And once it becomes that, our ego, our mind that just wants to protect us, treats it like a full-time job of let me scan, let me look out for all the things that are validating that I am always excluded. Not just the one time, but now let me look for all the reasons. It's an illusion. The mind is making it up to protect you. And what you're seeing isn't real, but what you are wanting to see based off that protective mechanism confirms what you already believe. So then you just see more of it, right? So it's it's like that idea of like you want to buy the red car, and then all of a sudden you see the red car everywhere. Well, it's kind of the same thing. If you're excluded one time and then it kind of becomes too, I'm always excluded, you're gonna be look for all the ways in which you're gonna be excluded all the time. And now it's the personality, it's the identity. And so it's not necessarily lying to you. It's just really loyal about protecting you. And it's not a character flaw either. It's just how our mind, how our brain operates when it goes into survival mode. Okay. Because if it feels the need to protect you, you're probably in survival mode, even though maybe it doesn't look like clear anxiety, clear panic, or some of the things that define us as anxious or in survival. And if you even listen to um an episode that I had recently that is about the survival responses, the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, this kind of goes with that too a little bit. I would highly recommend listening to that one. Um, I believe it's 66 or 67, but go listen to that because this is part of that. So when we are needing to protect ourselves, a piece of the thing I think that was showing up was the victim identity felt safe. And I want to tell you why that's so fucking hard to release. Being the victim means that the problem is out there, outside of us. It's not in here. And if the problem is outside of us, then we don't have to be responsible for changing anything. That's the payoff. The story of the victim, the sympathy, the like, oh poor you, the feeling that life is happening to you, to me, to her. And this is no judgment. This is just let me be fucking honest with myself and let me be honest with you. But staying in this is gonna cost you everything and it's gonna keep you from the very thing that you want, right? Building more of an identity that's excluded as the victim. The more that we're looking for that, the more like we're never the thing we actually want is to be included, right? But if all we can see are the things that are excluding us, we're never gonna have the end goal of being included. And so this is where I was like, hard fucking stop, Sari. We can't keep going down this, down this pathway. I don't like it. It doesn't feel good. So another piece of this is kind of again going back to looking for that validation. And I always say it's like kind of this idea of like, who can I get on my bandwagon? Right. You hear the term like bandwagon fans, and like they're only fans when like things are really going good. Well, we kind of look for bandwagon friends that we want to get on our bandwagon when we need to feel sorry for ourselves. And we know that this person can help do that. When we're in that deep victim identity, we go looking for evidence in our relationships to validate us and share a story so that they get on our side. And it is literally you're attracting the same energy that somebody else has. And we call it venting or processing, but it's gossip too. It's two people agreeing to one story. It's gossip at the root. And it's not because that they're bad, but it's the idea that misery loves company. And to be honest, like I was miserable, right? But sometimes I always say that like the thing that we need to heal sometimes comes back in like costume, and we don't recognize it. And so even though there were parts of myself that I kind of already worked on this, it was like coming back in in costume to see if I had really learned this lesson. And it was all incognito in a different situation. And before I knew it, I was so sucked in to this story, to this identity, to this personality that I didn't even realize I was miserable. And I was looking for everything that would validate the misery, whether it was conversation with a friend, not be included, judgment, just all of these things. And it makes you lose your power. It takes your power away. When we're in these survival emotions, our energy is low. If you look up the map of consciousness, it shows you that the higher energy of joy, bliss has so much energy. It's just like bouncing off the walls crazy. Like you don't even have to, it's not hard, it's easy. But when you're in these victimization survival emotions, your energy is tanking and it takes your power away. And you feel like a slug, at least I did. But recognition is the first thing. You can't change what you can't see. And again, I've been through this process so many times with other parts of myself that now it's really easy for me to be aware of how I'm behaving. And this is the first thing that me and clients work on is building your awareness so that you can catch yourself in real time. And sometimes it's not comfortable. You know, it's not liking yourself in the moment. Most people are never really willing to get this honest with themselves. So I want to share a few of the journaling practices that I use. And this is what I went back to. The first thing is like, let's name the story. What is the story I keep telling about myself? Or what's the story that I keep telling myself about my life right now? Write it down. Don't filter it out. What is the story that I'm not included? I didn't get the job promotion, that my partner doesn't think I don't do enough, you know, what whatever it might be. What's the story? And then underneath that story, what is the one raw core emotion driving all of it? One word if you can. Maybe it's rejected, unseen, unworthy, excluded, alone, suffering in lack? Like what is the one thing that core emotion? And then what states of being validate that identity? And the question for that is when I am in this emotion, what personality do I put on? What shows up to keep this identity alive? Maybe you withdraw yourself. Maybe you're suspicious, you're judgmental, you're resentful, you're needy, you're angry, you're closed off. Or maybe you even like overperform. What do I want to change? What do I actually want to feel instead? You know that you're feeling excluded. We'll just keep going with that for now. And what do you want to feel instead? You want to feel included, okay? So to be included, how do you have to show up? Write that down too, because that's the direction, right? It's so many people know what they don't want, but what do you want? Okay. You know you don't want to feel excluded. What do you want to feel instead? And who do you have to be to show up as that? And that means what is the death of that identity, that emotion, that personality of being excluded? She can't live here if you're trying to be included. Because then we have to figure out okay, how does the included version of you show up? And and what are the thoughts that run on a loop that you may not even notice? They slip by you with so much ease. What does that inner voice sound like? Is it judgmental? Is it resentful? Is it the victim? And just witness them, but write them down so that when they show up, you know it and you're like, uh-uh. That's the excluded personality. I gotta be the included personality. And then one of the most important pieces is what is the physical feeling in my body? How do I feel when I'm excluded? How do I feel when I judge people? How do I feel when I'm resentful? How do I feel when I'm the victim? Where does that show up in your body? I mean, to me, like I just this whole thing with myself, like I just think of like contracting, concave, like getting smaller and smaller and smaller. My shoulders, my stomach, I don't say anything. What is the feeling? We have to acknowledge the feeling because the body speaks first. It is the subconscious mind. We have to correlate the feelings in our body with that identity. Last app, who am I presenting to the world when this is running? What version of yourself is everyone else seeing? How are you behaving that they're seeing? Are you someone that people feel like you're just a closed-off person? Or are you open to new conversation? Are you the one making the phone call to someone who will disagree with you? What is the version of yourself that you're presenting to the world when you're feeling these things? And again, this is the exact work I do with my clients one-on-one. You can do this journaling exercise throughout this podcast and find the emotion. But the subconscious belief underneath it, the one wired when you are small, doesn't shift necessarily from journaling alone, although it can. So don't let it stop you. But this is what I love to do with my clients to really get down to this nitty-gritty, hold their hand in the process, shine the light on the things that are keeping them small so that they can take their fucking power back and not just talk about it, rewrite the hardware. Just as you put a you think of like a Mac and a PC, right? Like if you are wanting a PC to act as a Mac and you put the iOS, you know, processing system and a PC, it's not gonna fucking work like a PC, but you're asking it to. And so what is the hardwire system that you want to put in your body that works for you? If you're ready, go to thegrowthgoddess.net, book your free freedom roadmap session today. It's just a conversation, there's no pressure, it's just about creating clarity and creating a roadmap to that freedom where you feel included, where you feel powerful, where you feel worthy. So I'm gonna put all of these journaling questions in the show notes, but feel free to come back to them. Hit pause going through the questions and really get down and be honest with yourself. I always say it's radical honesty. If we want something bad enough, you have to be willing to be radically honest with yourself. What is actually the thing that's keeping you stuck and never gonna let you have the thing you want most? So keep on trucking. Also, if you need, there's the five-minute nervous system reset. And that is also the growth goddess.net slash reset where you can, you know, even it takes 120 seconds for the chemical emotions of stress to get out of your body of the victim of feeling lack, feeling unworthy, feeling judgmental. It takes 120 seconds. So that means if you put on the five-minute reset, all of those chemical emotions, that cortisol, the adrenaline that's flowing, would get out of your body. And if we stop it, then we're reteaching the body how to be. But if we continue the spiral, the validation of the identity, we're never gonna change. So show up for yourself today. You made it here. That means something. Keep showing up. See you next episode. If this episode felt like it was speaking directly to you, share it with another woman who might need to hear this too. And please leave a rating and a review. This helps boost the podcast so women just like you can find it and find real-time support and relief. Stay tuned for more episodes, stories, told, and real hope. Because you're more than just the identity of a woman who has life. And when you begin to heal your religion, you're not just changing your life. Changing your life, your daughters, your granddaughters, where